Here's a guaranteed formula for staging a successful comedy: Cast Eric Mather, wind him up like a child's toy, and just ... let him go.

"The Nerd" is a showcase for the almost savant-like talents of one of Denver's most gifted comic actors. All the more impressive given that Larry Shue's enduring 1981 farce is, at heart, really kind of creepy.

This staging marks the start of a new collaboration between the Backstage and Aurora Fox theaters. "The Nerd" is starting out at the Aurora Fox to give Denver metro audiences a rare chance to see the reliable work of Breckenridge's 37-year-old mainstay before moving 70 miles up Interstate 70, where it will then continue through Aug. 21.

Mather plays Rick Steadman, who shows up out of the blue on Indiana architect Willum Cubbert's front door on Willum's 34th birthday. Rick is an almost mythical figure in Willum's life: He's the soldier who pulled him from certain death off a Vietnam battlefield — an unseen guardian angel whom he's never had the chance to thank.

Years later, this bit of unfinished business has relegated Willum to a marginal middle-aged existence, unable to stand up for himself with his soul-sucking boss and unable to commit to his fair weather-girl girlfriend, who's fed up with his indecision and plans to leave him for a job in Washington.

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Enter Rick, who's anything but a stereotypical Army hero. He's a human freak show ... with a suitcase. Rick is an impossibly uncouth, socially oblivious goofball looking for a place to stay. He's a walking compendium of every bit of bad behavior ever displayed.

In short order, Rick throws Willum's life into complete chaos, begging the comic moral question: If you owe someone your life, are you all square if you should, you know, just kill him? No jury would convict Willum (Jack Wefso), but he's more conflicted than we are — which is part of his problem.

Playing the houseguest from hell comes with unnerving ease to Mather, whose attention to detail, both scripted and not, is equal parts marvel and horror. It's the nose-picking; the close talking. Mostly, it's the audible nasal cadence he creates that allows us to laugh at him with his every breath. He's like a deranged human pig with a belt that runs higher than his necktie. He's like a human whoopee cushion, but we don't know — and don't want to know — where all those sounds are coming from.

Mather is clearly a man of his own invention, but the character he creates is an amalgam of Steve Martin, Tim Conway, Harry Caray and Martin Short's Ed Grimley, with a little infusion of Robert De Niro menace for scary measure.

But there's a catch when you cast Mather, a comic tornado not seen around here since Mork "nanu-nanued" his way through Boulder. When you play along with Mather, you had better bring your "A" game. And, so far at least, some of his castmates are lagging a few letters behind, still searching for their precise panache. It doesn't help that the desperate final act borrows a little too heavily from Woody Allen's "Don't Drink the Water" and can't possibly sustain its comic momentum.

The playwright, who also wrote "The Foreigner," died at 39 in a plane crash.

Director Missy Moore gets solid work from Wefso in the thankless role of the exasperated straight man Willum, and Suzanna Wellens, best known for her oh-so-serious roles at the Germinal Stage, is a hoot and a half as the boss' wife with a most amusing way of relieving stress. An evolving Nathan Bock gets the best lines as the Cowardesque best friend Axel, whose credibility is blown when it's revealed he's a theater critic.

Nothing against Bock, but everyone knows that theater critics are no-fun party-poopers who would never be caught dead playing party games.